Tag Archives: gated communities

Portraying fear and multiculturalism in the Australian suburbs

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An Australian playwright talks about what he saw in the suburbs that prompted him to write his first play titled Little Borders:

Several years ago, my family home in Adelaide was knocked down and rebuilt. The suburb was once a new development, built onto what had originally been swampland. Over the years, the house had begun to sink; the kitchen was slightly lower than the adjacent rooms, and a crack ran through the length of the ceiling. Despite the suburb’s swampy foundations, our street was pristine. It was quiet, lined with trees, and curved alongside a man-made lake. People jogged. They walked their dogs. They smiled at strangers.

While our family home was being rebuilt, we moved to a rental property in a nearby suburb. The house was on a main road. We woke up at night to the sound of motorists loudly hammering their horns. My brother and I started walking to the corner store barefoot, in board shorts, to buy frozen peas and schnitzels.

We came home one day to find the house across the street sealed off by police tape, with hazmat-suited officers wandering in and out. The same prostitute kept making conversation with me at the bus stop. She was very friendly-and liked that I was half-Maltese, as she herself was born in Greece and was planning to return there later that year – but it was still a bizarre culture shock.

When we finally moved back to our rebuilt home, I remained fascinated with the idea of suburbs that are geographically close, but socioeconomically divided. I overheard our smiling, jogging, dog-walking neighbours talking in racially incensed language about the new residents of the housing commission homes down the road, reminding each other to lock their cars at night.

At the same time, both major political parties were battling it out over the issue of asylum seekers, with each leader attempting to court votes by promising a stronger brand of xenophobia than their opponent. From both sides, the message was clear: Boat People are approaching fast, they pose a threat to our national security, and the only rational response is mass panic.

I became interested in exploring how these notions of class difference and fear of outsiders clashed with the image of Australia as an egalitarian nation that celebrates its multiculturalism. At some point in my research, I struck upon the idea of setting the play in a gated community, which gave these issues potency, etching them into the physical world of the play. It was from this point that Little Borders really started to take shape.

This sounds like it could be an interesting play. I wonder how much it will be able to escape common cliches about suburban life that have been bandied about around in the United States since the 1950s.

The description of the suburbs quoted above does hint at the changes that American (and apparently Australian?) suburbs have experienced in recent years: they are becoming more diverse in terms of race and ethnicity as well as social class. Of course, there has been an uptick in gated communities as some suburban residents don’t look on these changes fondly and there are still profound divisions between certain suburbs.

A question: are there any plays that see suburbs as good places? For example, you could flip the above story a bit and suggest that suburbs that were once closed off to “others” are now slowly opening up which means new opportunities for some. The suburbs will likely never be ideal but there have been some notable changes in recent years.

Trayvon Martin case: social problems still present in gated communities

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An academic expert on “place-based crime prevention” talks about the role the gated community might have had on the Trayvon Martin case:

The answer is, according to Schneider, that there are no easy answers. “It’s hard to make a generalization,” he tells me, pointing out that there are many different types of gated communities catering to all parts of the economic and social spectrum. Some of them are walkable; some are not. Some are racially mixed (as is the Retreat at Twin Lakes), and some are not. Some are relatively affordable — you can find gated trailer parks – and some are filled with McMansions. Many of them are indistinguishable from any other suburban neighborhood. Did the built environment play a role in Martin’s death? Add it to the list of things we can never really know for sure about this terrible case.

As for whether gated communities deliver on one of their main selling points — protection from crime — Schneider says that research to date has been inconclusive. “It’s not a panacea,” he says about erecting gates. “You’re just as likely to be burgled by your next-door neighbor, especially if there are teenagers.” Criminals from outside are also quick to figure out how to get in. “They learn the code from the pizza guy,” says Schneider. “The effects of gating decay over time.”

Gated communities exploded in popularity in the United States during the end of the 20th century, but Schneider points out that they are an old phenomenon. “We used to call them castles,” he says.

Here is the conclusion to this article:

If the case of Trayvon Martin has shown us anything, it’s that a society’s problems — inequity, racism, and fear among them — have no problem getting through the gates.

Even if social problems do end up affecting gated communities, academics tend to argue that people buy into and want to live in these communities because they perceive them to be safer. This supports a classic sociological axiom: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” Realistically, while these communities are said to be “gated,” they are rarely as restrictive as castles could be and are often fairly open to people who want to pass through. I wonder if these communities would be better off to get rid of the gates (in whatever form they take) and simply build their development in a more inaccessible place, such as a location that only has an entrance to a busy road (cuts off pedestrian traffic) or is located in a wealthy or out-of-way area (which limits vehicular traffic).

Lost in the Trayvon Martin story: the mindset behind gated communities

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Lost in the Trayvon Martin story is the location where this all occurred: a gated community. While these are common in some places, particularly in Florida, one author explains the unique mindset in gated communities and how this might have contributed to the situation:

From 2007 to 2009, I traveled 27,000 miles, living in predominantly white gated communities across this country to research a book. I threw myself into these communities with gusto — no Howard Johnson or Motel 6 for me. I borrowed or rented residents’ homes. From the red-rock canyons of southern Utah to the Waffle-House-pocked exurbs of north Georgia, I lived in gated communities as a black man, with a youthful style and face, to interview and observe residents.

The perverse, pervasive real-estate speak I heard in these communities champions a bunker mentality. Residents often expressed a fear of crime that was exaggerated beyond the actual criminal threat, as documented by their police department’s statistics. Since you can say “gated community” only so many times, developers hatched an array of Orwellian euphemisms to appease residents’ anxieties: “master-planned community,” “landscaped resort community,” “secluded intimate neighborhood.”

No matter the label, the product is the same: self-contained, conservative and overzealous in its demands for “safety.” Gated communities churn a vicious cycle by attracting like-minded residents who seek shelter from outsiders and whose physical seclusion then worsens paranoid groupthink against outsiders. These bunker communities remind me of those Matryoshka wooden dolls.  A similar-object-within-a-similar-object serves as shelter; from community to subdivision to house, each unit relies on staggered forms of security and comfort, including town authorities, zoning practices, private security systems and personal firearms.

Residents’ palpable satisfaction with their communities’ virtue and their evident readiness to trumpet alarm at any given “threat” create a peculiar atmosphere — an unholy alliance of smugness and insecurity. In this us-versus-them mental landscape, them refers to new immigrants, blacks, young people, renters, non-property-owners and people perceived to be poor.

This account lines up with academic research on the topic: gated communities are intended to be safe places. They are generally in the suburbs and residents move there to feel more secure. While not stated explicitly, these communities are meant to help keep issues like poverty, race, social class, and crime outside the walls and fences.

Here are the three best works I know on the subject:

1. McKenzie, Evan. 1994. Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.  

2. Blakely, Edward and Mary Gail Snyder. 1999. Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution.

3. Low, Setha M. 2003. Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America. New York: Routledge.

One of the ironies revealed in these works is that these gated communities are rarely completely sealed off from the outside world. The ones that are tend to be the province of the wealthy and have very controlled entry points. For many gated communities, while there might be fences or walls, not all communities have manned gates and there are often multiple entrances into a neighborhood. So the gated nature of the community is more about a feeling of security than an actual sense that no unwanted outsider can get in.

In the end, gated communities do not necessarily lead to more violent action against outsiders. At the same time, the mindset in these communities is explicitly about safety and protection from the outside world.

“Gated communities for tourists” in Turkey

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Gated communities are a common feature of American life but I was intrigued by comments from a sociology about “gated communities for tourists” in Turkey:

While economic consequences of holiday resorts are under discussion, some also underline the sociological outcomes. According to sociologist Özgür Sar?, who specializes in tourism sociology, many Turkish cities are closed to touristic activities.

“I did my field study in Konya, where many tourists come for Mevlana (the Muslim poet and Sufi mystic),” Sar? told the Daily News. “All tourist attractions are located around his tomb; there is nothing else for tourists in other parts of the city. This is the same in all cities of Turkey, even in Istanbul. The tourist route in Istanbul doesn’t go beyond Sultanahmet-Eminönü-Taksim route. So these areas also become gated environments, where there is no interaction with the locals.”

Sar? said most Turkish municipalities avoid bringing tourists and the local public together; and therefore keep touristic activities in one part of the city.

“Turkey has a conservative society and tourism means breaking the conservatism,” Sar? said. “Municipalities are concerned because they don’t want any unwanted incidents. On the other hand, they have to obey the instructions of the Tourism Ministry, so they prefer keeping touristic locations on one side,” Sar? said.

This highlights a larger issue: just how much should tourists interact with locals? It sounds like the lines are drawn more clearly in Turkey than in some other places and many tourists are supposed to “experience” the country within the confines of resorts. Of course, sociologists would note that these resorts offer only a very limited and likely consumerist view of whatever country is outside the resort. I imagine that tourists in these Turkish resorts still interact with at least a few Turkish residents who are performing service jobs within the resort. But if this is the extent of the interaction, it is hard to suggest one has truly experienced Turkey. And then we could ask how different the “gated” resort in Turkey is from the same kind of resort in Cancun and from all sorts of other beach locations.

Underlying a lot of the discussion in this article is that Turkey could grow the tourism industry and bring more money into the country. “Gated” resorts may bring in some money but it could be spread around more, possibly more to average citizens and less to resort corporations, if tourists visited more sites around the country.

From gated communities to cameras and license plate readers

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In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was an increase in scholarly work addressing the growing phenomenon of gated communities. Such communities were often criticized for at least giving the appearance of trying to withdraw from the world, being exclusive, and indulging the fears of suburbanites. So I wonder what these researchers might think about a community that wants to use cameras to read the license plates of everyone who enters their community:

Kings Point is one of the wealthiest villages on the North Shore, and residents want to keep it that way with the latest security…

To protect its 3.3 square miles, Kings Point plans to install 44 cameras and license plate readers at each of the 19 points of entry. The devices will take pictures of every vehicle and license plate and compare them to data bases.

“It will alert us to suspended registrations, felonies, stolen cars, order of protection, sex offenders, things like that,” Kings Point Police Commissioner Jack Miller said…

There’s no way of knowing whether the project will reduce crime. It may just send it off to other towns that are less secure.

Police said the project will cost $1 million, and will be paid for over several years. They also stressed only police will have access to surveillance information.

The article mentions one other key piece of information: there seems to have been a (small?) string of recent crimes in the community which has prompted the installation of cameras.

There may be some privacy issues here but I think some of same concerns about gated communities could be raised about this move. This is a wealthy community: according to Census data, there are 5,305 residents, the median household income (in 2009 dollars) is $144,000, the median home value is $1,000,000+, 55.3% of those 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree or more, and the community is 95.3% white, 3.4% Asian, and 3.1% Latino. Is this simply a move to protect the exclusivity of this community? While the article references plans in New York and London (presumably to fight terrorism), does a community like this really need to go to this level? If you look at some neighborhood/real estate websites, Kings Point Village seems to have quite a low crime rate (with a fun feature of this link being you get to see your odds of “becoming a victim” in whatever community you search for). This seems to me to be a much better question than whether police should have access to this information and therefore invade your privacy.

Additionally, it will be interesting to see what police do with this data. Which criminal offenses are enough to warrant attention? Is the goal of the program just to have a record of who was in the community so that they can be tracked down later or will there be more immediate actions taken? If the goal is to just to track down people after a crime has been committed, will residents be happy or will they suggest that the crime should have been prevented?

Gated communities on HGTV

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As someone who studies suburbs and housing, I admit enjoying watching people choose homes on HGTV on shows like House Hunters. I’ve noticed that one factor that occasionally influences the choice of homes is whether it is located in a gated community. A few thoughts about this topic, gated communities, which has attracted more attention from sociologists and planner in the last two decades:

1. On these shows, the gated communities often pop up in the South or West, particularly in Florida or California.

2. We rarely see any evidence of the gated community like the entryway to the neighborhood (a fake guardhouse or a real guardhouse?)  or a fence around the entire neighborhood. We are simply told that the suburban home is in a gated community.

3.  At least when making their choices on screen, the people rarely talk much about the fact that a home is in a gated community. This is probably due to the fact that the show is supposed to be about the home and not the neighborhood. (So how about a new show where it is less about the individual housing unit and more about selecting a neighborhood?)

4. The homes in the gated communities vs. those that are not in a gated community look very similar. Ultimately, it is really rare that anyone on this show is selecting a home that is in a “unsafe neighborhood.” As sociologists have suggested, living in a gated community is often a decision made regarding some amorphous outside threat. They are devices that portray a certain image while also acting as reassurance for residents. As some have shown, like Setha Low in Behind the Gates, some suburban residents feel very afraid even when they live in exclusive, upscale neighborhoods. The gates in many neighborhoods don’t really keep people out but they help the residents feel better.